This Analog Life

I prefer to be made of mud.

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 14:46:00 -0500

“This is a very good question. There are several important things you need to do:

“First, you need a round hole in your chest that goes all the way through you. I can never stress enough to the kids, it has to be a perfect circle, about the diameter of a drinking glass rim, it has to be in the absolute center of your chest—like where a heart would go on a plumber or a woman—and it has to go clean through you. If you’re standing in front of me and I can’t see the wall behind you, you’re never really going to write much more than a dream journal, recipe book, or maybe one of those manuals that tells people what writing is.

“A lot of people say “what about my heart, what’s going to pump my blood around,” which brings us to step two: you have to be made of something other than flesh and blood. I prefer to be made of mud, because it keeps women and children away from me. Other writers are made of dirt, or excrement, the choice is yours, it just can’t be anything that anyone would want in their bed and it has to be a substance that adheres to itself but nothing around it, so that you can keep a generally human shape for as long as possible. Appearing human-like is important to the next step.

“Sit or stand in front of paper or a computing device and turn your back to everything, which will incite it to attack you. Everything preys on humanity and goes for the heart, so hold still, arch your back and it should shoot through your hole and onto your keyboard. As it passes, it will be tainted and scattered by the inside rim of whatever you’re made of, which some would call your “voice” but which I call “filth.” The more there is, the more people notice you’re “a writer” and the more you’re doing it wrong. Your job is to be a heartless piece of dirt, a puppet, a necessary but largely unremarkable conduit of something better than you, something lovable, something with purpose, and your one redeeming act before it finishes with you is to find the angle at which you barely affect its path.”

— Community creator Dan Harmon, answering the question, “What advice would you give to others who aspire to write a TV series comedy, and just write in general?”

archiveofaffinities: Antecedents of the L’Enfant Plan, from...

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 14:12:41 -0400

archiveofaffinities:

Antecedents of the L’Enfant Plan, from Elbert Peets “Famous Town Planners III - L’Enfant”

i12bent: Petticoat Lane London, Ralston Crawford (1906-78)....

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 12:32:11 -0400

i12bent:

Petticoat Lane London, Ralston Crawford (1906-78). Date unknown. [Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden - Ralston Crawford Collection]

The glut

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 19:07:48 -0400

Fifteen years ago, the main problem a lover of music— or film, or television, or other varieties of pop culture— would experience was scarcity. It took money to get hold of the stuff, and if you liked anything weird, it took effort, too. As a result, the default mode was to like what you could. In fact, the best way to demonstrate to others that you cared and were discerning about music was to like things— to have enjoyed exploring all these realms that took some effort to get to.

Over the past decade and a half, this situation seems to have reversed. The problem people talk about now is not scarcity but glut: a glut of music available to consume, a glut of media to tell you about it, a glut of things that desperately want your attention. Somewhere along the way, the default mode has taken a hard shift in the direction of showing your discernment by not liking things— by seeing through the hype and feeling superior to whatever you’re being told about in a given week. Give it the attention it wants, but in the negative.

This extends far outside of music. There’s an entire Arch Snarky Commenter persona people now rush to adopt, in which they read things on the Internet and then compete to most effectively roll their eyes at it. And there’s nothing inherently terrible about that; a lot of the phenomena we read about every day can afford that kind of skepticism.

It’s interesting, though, just how overclocked a bullshit detector can get— to the point where we’re verging on a kind of paranoia about things that are, in the end, mostly trying to offer us pleasure.

— “Why We Fight No. 15,” Nitsuh Abebe. Pitchfork

flutterknife: Testing a bullet-proof vest in Washington, DC. 13...

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 18:55:51 -0400

flutterknife:

Testing a bullet-proof vest in Washington, DC. 13 September 1923.

Mowing the lawn

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 18:49:44 -0400

This bit struck me from today’s New Yorker hagiography of the Bin Laden raid:

In the months after the raid, the media have frequently suggested that the Abbottabad operation was as challenging as Operation Eagle Claw and the “Black Hawk Down” incident, but the senior Defense Department official told me that “this was not one of three missions. This was one of almost two thousand missions that have been conducted over the last couple of years, night after night.” He likened the routine of evening raids to “mowing the lawn.” On the night of May 1st alone, special-operations forces based in Afghanistan conducted twelve other missions; according to the official, those operations captured or killed between fifteen and twenty targets. “Most of the missions take off and go left,” he said. “This one took off and went right.”

It’s really something to try to wrap your head around the scale & global reach of our targeted captures & assassinations. On the night of May 1st alone …

34th Street, New York, NY, Larry Silver 1952. [via Bruce...

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 12:24:11 -0400

34th Street, New York, NY, Larry Silver 1952.

[via Bruce Silverstein, via liquidnight]

Headed north to New York in a month, Labor Day to Christmas. Roosting in Brooklyn, still homeless, & the job does not pay. But it’s worth huddling in a doorway with my head down if the doorway’s in the center of everything.

“Florida alone accounts for one-third of the fresh tomatoes raised in the United States, and...

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 13:13:00 -0400

“Florida alone accounts for one-third of the fresh tomatoes raised in the United States, and from October to June, virtually all the fresh-market, field-grown tomatoes in the country come from the Sunshine State, which ships more than one billion pounds every year. It takes a tough tomato to stand up to the indignity of such industrial scale farming, so most Florida tomatoes are bred for hardness, picked when still firm and green (the merest trace of pink is taboo), and artificially gassed with ethylene in warehouses until they acquire the rosy red skin tones of a ripe tomato.

[…]

“According to analyses conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, fresh tomatoes today have 30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin, 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than they did in the 1960s. But the modern tomato does shame its 1960s counterpart in one area: It contains fourteen times as much sodium.”

— excerpt from Tomatoland, by Barry Estabrook. What’s scary about postmodernity isn’t that it drives certain things or modes of being to extinction, it’s that it replaces them with copies or rough analogues, and it becomes impossible to remember how the world could be any other way.

They’re finally in season here on First & R, & I’m helping to make the gazpacho on the menu at Big Bear, & — you know this — there’s something miraculous about the taste of a real tomato.

article via Duff Clarity.

(via rhea137, raelmozo)

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 00:00:06 -0400

(via rhea137, raelmozo)

Pack the suitcase.

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 10:15:49 -0400

Pack the suitcase. Unpack it, pack it, unpack it, pack it: typewriter (Hermes Baby), passport (SA 323273), ticket, airport, stairs, airplanes, fasten seatbelt, take off, unfasten seatbelt, flight, rocking, sun, stars, space, hips of strolling stewardesses, sleep, clouds, falling engine speed, fasten seatbelt, descent, circling, landing, earth, unfasten seatbelts, stairs, airport, immunization book, visa, customs, taxi, streets, houses, people, hotel, key, room, stuffiness, thirst, otherness, foreignness, loneliness, waiting, fatigue, life.

Ryszard Kapuściński, The Soccer War.

Finally back in the States after the usual string of incident & minor catastrophe, all too much and too little to bear talking about.

thingsthatscarelaurenleto: via Bnter 1969 Interview with...

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 08:40:32 -0400

thingsthatscarelaurenleto:

via Bnter

1969 Interview with Nabokov. Earliest suggestion of emoticons?

Nabokov: Cataloger of butterflies, inventor of the emoticon.

carnetimages-8: Little houses by Cuban artist Roberto Diego via...

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 17:50:30 -0400

carnetimages-8:

Little houses by Cuban artist Roberto Diego

via designtripper

A darkness beyond this.

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 15:57:17 -0400

When the sky’s dark face
catches your eye again,
let memory write
of a darkness beyond this:

days self-blinded, nights
of searching untaught,
thinking your own thought,
light.

from “Octonaires on the World’s Vanity and Inconstancy,” by the Reformation pastor & theologian Antoine de Chandieu, who studied under Calvin and died at the end of the 16th century. Translated from the French by Nate Klug.

Found in the June issue of Poetry, which is dedicated to translation. I’m picking through the online stuff right now; so far I’ve come across a German-speaking 1920s dadaist and classical Arabic poetry with words in Old English, and I’m as happy as a clam.

"Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying: — That is God. Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee! — What? Mr..."

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 17:45:37 -0400

“Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:
— That is God.
Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!
— What? Mr Deasy asked.
— A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.”

- For Bloomsday. (via evanfleischer)

"A scandal, a scandal, to let so much time slip and I leaning on the Bridge watching it go. Only..."

Sat, 11 Jun 2011 16:00:49 -0400

“A scandal, a scandal, to let so much time slip and I leaning on the Bridge watching it go. Only leaning has not been my pose; running up and down, irritably, excitedly, restlessly. And the stream viciously eddying. Why do I write these metaphors? Because I have written nothing for an age.”

- Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry dated 27 October 1928 (via proustitute)

rerylikes: THE ZONDERS. Illustration see Jean-Paul Satre by...

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 08:07:27 -0400

rerylikes:

THE ZONDERS. Illustration

see Jean-Paul Satre by Antanas Sutkus, 1965 [thanks wonderfulambiguity]

Flimsiest

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 15:38:57 -0400

Part of the charm of this poem, if you’re charmed by it, is the flimsiness of the conceit — the whole thing is spun around the tiny, silly homophony of bough and bow, as though Morley is trying to see just how much he can squeeze out of this pip of an idea.

I often pass a gracious tree
Whose name I can’t identify,
But still I bow, in courtesy
It waves a bough, in kind reply.

I do not know your name, O tree
(Are you a hemlock or a pine?)
But why should that embarrass me?
Quite probably you don’t know mine.

— Christopher Morley

I can just about remember other things that strike me as like this — I think, for instance, that I had this feeling about a dozen times a minute while reading Gravity’s Rainbow last summer … but no, it’s just the shape of a memory, nothing but wool & smoke inside. Maybe now that I’ve written about it I’ll stub my toe on some more examples. Call it part one of a series, Silliness in Serious Literature.

defacedbook: Ingrid Burrington INDEX OF SMALL AND LARGE...

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 15:28:25 -0400

defacedbook:

Ingrid Burrington

INDEX OF SMALL AND LARGE THINGS

Magnetic clasp case, 52 index cards. Edition of 2

Bricolage, ii

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 15:53:32 -0400

‘The landscape is both lush and barren. Profuse vegetation everywhere (palm trees, rubber plants, a hundred varieties of wildflowers), but the volcanic earth is strewn with boulders. Land crabs plod through his garden (he describes them as small armored tanks, prehistoric creatures who look as if they belong on the moon) … ‘

Invisible, Paul Auster

‘What have you done with all your words & gaudy language hats?’

Laura Glenum

There are those who grow
gardens in their heads
paths lead from their hair
to sunny and white cities

it’s easy for them to write
they close their eyes
immediately schools of images
stream down from their foreheads

my imagination
is a piece of board
my sole instrument
is a wooden stick

I strike the board
it answers me
yes—yes
no—no

[…]

from “A Knocker,” Zbiginew Herbert [1]

Oh sweet world soaked, like bread,
in sweet milk for the terrible toothless God.

Yehuda Amichai [2]

‘The poles of the earth have wandered. The equator has apparently moved.’

The first sentence of Annals of the Former World, John McPhee.

‘One morning I knew, finally, that lists of examples wouldn’t do any longer, but examples were all that I had. In that country they speak prose. And not only do they speak it, they live it. They didn’t ban poetry — they still encourage it, officially — but they did get rid of the insides of things, the interiors that poetry once, in another era before the fall, referred to. In that sense, they are like us.’

The Soul Thief, Charles Baxter

‘An accident isn’t necessarily ever over.’

The last line of “Scratching the Head,” Diane Williams [3].

____________________

[1] Translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott. Richard Hoffman, who used to teach me, read it as part of remarks about the role of politics & morality in art he made at a panel at the Massachussetts Poetry Festival.
[2] “Seven Laments for the War Dead,” or “for those Fallen in War.” Translated from the Hebrew by the author & Ted Hughes. The complete poem here.
[3] First read this quoted in “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” a talk Gary Lutz delivered at Columbia in 2008 that was published in The Believer a year later.

This music box designed by ÉCAL University of Art and Design...

Sun, 05 Jun 2011 16:30:21 -0400

This music box designed by ÉCAL University of Art and Design Lausanne graduate José Ferrufino uses the movement of the musical mechanism to cause sticks of barley to gently sway.

via…